
This Is Water
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Narrated by:
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Amy Wallace-Havens
About this listen
Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion?
This audiobook version of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, read by his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, captures his electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend. Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.
©2009 David Foster Wallace Literary Trust (P)2009 David Foster Wallace Literary TrustListeners also enjoyed...
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How this differs from the other version
- By Jonathan Penley on 12-26-17
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David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
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Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances - from studio recordings to live performances - that are finally compiled in this unique collection.
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The best book on Audible!
- By Karen Chance on 04-07-16
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In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.
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Wonderful book, terrible narration!
- By Karen on 08-20-13
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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- By: David Foster Wallace
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David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
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This is ABRIDGED
- By Mark on 09-26-09
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Oblivion
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- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.
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Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-12
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The David Foster Wallace Reader
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- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, David Foster Wallace, Sally Foster Wallace, and others
- Length: 48 hrs and 44 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here - with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work.
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Impossible to use without Chapter Names
- By Ethan Klitzke on 12-04-21
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Consider the Lobster
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures.
-
-
How this differs from the other version
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- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace
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- Original Recording
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Overall
-
Performance
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Collected here for the first time are the stories and speeches of David Foster Wallace as read by the author himself. Over the course of his career, David Foster Wallace recorded a variety of his work in diverse circumstances - from studio recordings to live performances - that are finally compiled in this unique collection.
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The best book on Audible!
- By Karen Chance on 04-07-16
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- By: David Foster Wallace
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-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.
-
-
Wonderful book, terrible narration!
- By Karen on 08-20-13
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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 17 mins
- Highlights
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he combines hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
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This is ABRIDGED
- By Mark on 09-26-09
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Oblivion
- Stories
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.
-
-
Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-12
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The David Foster Wallace Reader
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff, David Foster Wallace, Sally Foster Wallace, and others
- Length: 48 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here - with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work.
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-
Impossible to use without Chapter Names
- By Ethan Klitzke on 12-04-21
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On Tennis
- Five Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: A collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers. A "long-time rabid fan of tennis," and a regionally ranked tennis player in his youth, David Foster Wallace wrote about the game like no one else. On Tennis presents David Foster Wallace's five essays on the sport, published between 1990 and 2006, and hailed as some of the greatest and most innovative sports writing of our time.
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Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform
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The Pale King
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The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
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The King is dead, long live the King!
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The Broom of the System
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Evidence I WASTED my College years.
- By Darwin8u on 04-18-12
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Girl with Curious Hair
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Overall
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Performance
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From the eerily "real", almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and over-televised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, David Foster Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.
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This book is not NOT a Datsun!
- By Darwin8u on 04-15-12
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Everything and More
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Part history, part philosophy, part love letter to the study of mathematics, Everything and More is an illuminating tour of infinity. With his infectious curiosity and trademark verbal pyrotechnics, David Foster Wallace takes us from Aristotle to Newton, Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, and finally Georg Cantor and his set theory. Through it all, Wallace proves to be an ideal guide - funny, wry, and unfailingly enthusiastic. Featuring an introduction by Neal Stephenson, this edition is a perfect introduction to the beauty of mathematics and the undeniable strangeness of the infinite.
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Equations via audio are tuff
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Outlive
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Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.
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Too Much Filler
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As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Halloween approaches. Come, brave listener, pull up a chair, and spend some time with master storyteller Stephen Fry as he tells us some of his favourite ghost stories of all time, in truly terrifying spatial audio. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the tortured spirits of M.R. James, from Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying tale of a doppelganger to Charlotte Riddell’s Open Door that should definitely stay shut, join Stephen as he tells you some truly terrifying tales.
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Wonderful narration. Mediocre stories.
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Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world.
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Water
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This audiobook introduce young scientists to the basics of the water cycle! This nonfiction book introduces emergent listeners to the importance of water, explaining evaporation and condensation, dew and frost, and the three states of water.
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In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort.
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Couldn’t finish it
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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
- A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
- By: David Lipsky
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain, Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.
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Leapin' Over That Wall of Self
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Looking to some of the world's greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character. Labor activist Frances Perkins understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument in a larger cause. Dwight Eisenhower organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint.
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Rich, textured stories
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With footnotes!
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Oblivion
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Overall
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Story
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.
-
-
Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-12
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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
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- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain, Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
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In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.
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Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. This is the audio recording of David Foster Wallace delivering that very address. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others.
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-
The best 20 minutes of my life.
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-
The Pale King
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-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
-
-
The King is dead, long live the King!
- By Darwin8u on 10-31-16
-
Infinite Jest
- By: David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 64 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
-
-
With footnotes!
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By: David Foster Wallace, and others
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The Broom of the System
- A Novel
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the center of The Broom of the System is the betwitching (and also bewildered) heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio, which sits on the edge of a suburban wasteland-the Great Ohio Desert. Lenore works as a switchboard attendant at a publishing firm, and in addition to her mind-numbing job, she has a few other problems. Her great-grandmother, a one-time student of Wittgenstein, has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home.
-
-
Evidence I WASTED my College years.
- By Darwin8u on 04-18-12
-
Oblivion
- Stories
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.
-
-
Just 2 Fast & Huge & ALL Interconnected 4 Words
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-12
-
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
- A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
- By: David Lipsky
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain, Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.
-
-
Leapin' Over That Wall of Self
- By Darwin8u on 08-27-12
By: David Lipsky
What listeners say about This Is Water
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- Agarikon 1969
- 03-29-20
The emotional attachment to his experience!
He thought of the life to the broadest capacity. His commencement speech was emotionally charged my curiosity; my experience struck a chord, treasure each occasion.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-24-21
title
Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living....
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Overall
- Adryan
- 05-14-09
Too short for what you pay for!
Make no mistake, the speech itself was profound, heart spoken and brilliant. Basically the message is, mindful self-awareness leads to love, compassion and eventually a happy life. Very similar to the core values of Buddhism but described in a funny, light hearted and down to earth manner. The only problem here is that for only 24 Mins this speech is NOT WORTH $7! In fact you can get the whole transcript of this speech online FREE by simply doing a google search (I only found about it after I purchased the audiobook). Perhaps 2$ would have been a much more reasonable price.
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37 people found this helpful
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- Tom
- 12-12-22
Would have preferred a recording of his speech
Basically Wallace is restating Plato’s dictum of the importance of self-knowledge as the key to making life worth living. Both Plato and Wallace are offering good advice to a group of arrogant self-congratulating graduates convinced of their own intellectual mastery. Four Stars for the reminder. ****
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- Kindle Customer
- 01-22-23
Default thinking
This little snippet from Mr Wallace is well worth a listen. It will give you something to think about.
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- Robin
- 08-13-13
Beware this isnt in his voice
What would have made This Is Water better?
First time using audible and was so excited to get a copy of this speech I didn't realize it wasnt done in his voice - the voice I listened to online. I do not like the womans voice - I wanted to hear this in the voice of the man I heard online. So beware and also I thought this was a longer version and it doesn't appear to be anything more then the same version read by some woman. Not sure why they took a verbal speech - converted it to text then hired some woman to read it. Why not just make the original speech in his voice available for download? I feel like I was just robbed for ten bucks. Really disappointed.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
wasnt the voice of the original speaker
Any additional comments?
Why take a verbal speech - convert it to text then hire some woman to read it?
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Overall
- Linda Ericson
- 03-08-10
DFW is not the reader!
I was so excited to find this, I neglected to check to make sure the author was the one actually reading. I mean, it was a speech he gave, and I have heard bits of the audio before so I just assumed. sigh.
His sister does a goof job reading, I was just really disappointed it wasn't the full audio from the speech.
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Overall
- Andy
- 09-07-09
puzzling
The content of this commencement speech was totally over my head. While I understood the profanity, the rest of it did not resonate.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- J Williams
- 06-11-16
23 minutes!
What disappointed you about This Is Water?
23 minutes does not equate to one full credit. Bought this on my phone on Amazon.com so didn't realize it was so short/
Has This Is Water turned you off from other books in this genre?
no
Would you be willing to try another one of Amy Wallace-Havens’s performances?
no
If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from This Is Water?
not long enough to edit
Any additional comments?
rip-off
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